“Everyone trusts a doctor,” purred Butters, in a tone of voice that Butters would never have used. “Even wizards, Dresden.”

I felt myself tensing. “Corpsetaker.”

“You were able to manifest after all? Intriguing. You’ve a natural gift for darker magic, I think. My master would have snapped you up in an instant.”

I’d spent an afternoon with Murphy working on gun disarms, at Dough Joe’s Hurricane Gym. I tried to remember which way I had to spin to attempt to take the gun away. It depended on how it was being held—and I had no idea how Corpsetaker was holding the weapon on me. I was pretty sure Butters was a lefty, but I didn’t think that would matter to the Corpsetaker once she set up shop. “Oh, boy. I could have hung out with people like you? I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have worked out.”

“Possibly not,” Corpsetaker said. “I accorded you far more respect than you merited, as an opponent. How much of you is left behind that body you’ve cobbled together? Scarcely more than one of those pathetic wraiths, I think. You could have made a viable move in time, but clearly you’ve no patience, no head for strategy.”

“Yeah. I guess I’ve still got a soul and a conscience where you installed that stuff.”

“Soul? Conscience?” Corpsetaker said, almost laughing. “Those are nothing but words. They aren’t even true limits—just the figments of them. Useless.”

“Just because something isn’t solid doesn’t mean it isn’t real,” I said. “If you had a brain in your head, you’d know that.”

“You’re obsessed with the fantasies of the young,” she replied with my friend’s breath. “Though I must admit that that the ironic reversal of our current state is simply delicious.”

And without a hesitation or any change in the tone of her voice, she put a bullet into the back of my head.

The pain was infinitely brief and indescribable, a massive spike of agony that felt as if it should have sent me flying. I saw a cloud of something fly forward and then splatter all over one of the wolves and the nearest Big Hood. Ectoplasm, I realized dully. My physical body had been destroyed. It had fallen back into the spirit matter from which I’d formed it.

The pain faded, and then I was back in the still, neutral absence of sensation of the ghost state. I reached for the splattered matter with an instinctive, unspoken yearning to return to it.

I could barely see my hand.

I tried to turn around, but it felt like I was submerged in something thicker and more viscous than water, and it took forever.

I stared into the Corpsetaker’s eyes within Butters’s face and watched the body-jumping lunatic smirk at me. “Not much of you now, is there?” she murmured. “You’ll be a wraith within days. I think that balances our account. Enjoy eternity, Dresden.”

I tried to snarl a curse, but I was just so tired. I couldn’t get the sound to come out of me. And by the time I had tried, Corpsetaker had taken Butters’s body back to the bottom of the stairs. She was moving so fast.